Read it on a long bikeride from north to south California. My memory of the book is mixed in with the isolation of pedaling 10 hours a day, reading 5 or 6 and sleeping the rest. Or rather passing out from exhaustion. MM was a good book to be exhausted with--I did not fight going slowly, long discussions, or cold TB treatments.

Don't get me wrong, the two stars are not a reflection on the writing. There are some fantastic pieces of writing in this book - mostly in the voice of the narrator. However, I cannot bring myself to rate it higher. This would be to say I liked it. And the condensed truth is that apart from the narrator - I just didn't.

I guess I also prefer books that have a story to tell that I can care about, but since TMM/Zauberberg is about characters which can't bring myself to particularly care about, their story does leave me rather un-affected.

Hans Castorp plans a 3 week holiday visiting his cousin Joaquim who is a TB patient at a sanatorium in Switzerland. But instead of being just a visitor, Castorp ends up becoming a patient and lives at the sanatorium for many years. In this community, everyone shares one trait, they are all ill with tuberculosis and are there to participate in the rest cure which involves eating huge meals and breathing the fresh mountain air. This epic novel (almost 800 pages!) explores many different facets of life in Europe during the early 19th century, including social customs and behaviors and the impending war. But with a cast of people who range from being terminally ill, to having some mild medical issues, there is a wonderful philosophical analysis of life and the role people play in the world. ( )

An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks' visit.

The story of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, not on his own account, for in him the reader will make acquaintance with a simple-minded though pleasing young man, but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us highly worth telling - though it must needs be borne in mind, in Hans Castorp's behalf, that it is his story, and not every story happens to everybody - this story, we say, belongs to the long ago; it is already, so to speak, covered with historical mould, and unquestionably to be presented in the tense best suited to a narrative out of the depth of the past.

Quotations

Well, about the skin. What do you want to hear about your sensory sheath? You know, don't you, that it is your outside brain - ontogenetically the same as that apparatus of the so-called higher centres up there in your cranium? The central nervous system is nothing but a modification of the outer skin-layer; among the lower animals the distinction between central and peripheral doesn't exist, they smell and taste with their skin, it is the only sensory organ they have. Must be rather nice - if you can put yourself in their place. On the other hand, in such highly differentiated forms of life as you and I are, the skin has fallen from its high estate; it has to confine itself to feeling ticklish; that is to say, to being simply a protective and registering apparatus - but devilishly on the qui vive for anything that tries to come too close about the body. It even puts our feelers - the body hairs, which are nothing but hardened skin cells - and they get wind of the approach of whatever it is, before the skin is touched. Just between ourselves, it is quite possible that this protecting and defending function of the skin extends beyond the physical. Do you know what makes you go red and pale? ( -- Hofrat Behrens in conversation with Hans Castorp p 263)

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

A sanitorium in the Swiss Alps reflects the societal ills of pre-twentieth-century Europe, and a young marine engineer rises from his life of anonymity to become a pivotal character in a story about how a human's environment affects self identity. In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.… (more)